Archive for October, 2007

The ocean quahog clam was dredged up off the coast of Iceland, and researchers calculated its age by counting the rings on its shell. Professor Chris Richardson, from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Sciences explained that the rings on the clam’s shell provide researchers with information about growth conditions year-by-year, and so provide a record of the environmental changes during the animal’s life.

Since the President was so concerned about “socialized medicine” that he vetoed SCHIP expansion, can we assume that his trip to Southern California tomorrow is to deliver a lecture about the evils of socialized firefighting? After all, if the free market is the best way to fight poverty, injury, and disease, I’m sure the invisible hand would have no problem putting out a few fires.

Less than a week ago Periodic Comet Holmes (17P) was a dim and distant 17th-magnitude blip out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But on October 24th, skywatchers looked up to see a bright new yellow-orange “star” shining in the constellation Perseus.

Please answer the following questions. If no answer is acceptable to you, leave it unanswered.

It also reorders a bunch of the potential answers in a way that might seem to some suspiciously like a push poll. But on closer examination, the answers seem to biased because they’re taken from the candidates’ public positions on the issues, which make Dorothy Parker’s “gamut from A to B” look positively diverse. For example, there seems to be no one who thinks that we should do anything about immigration that doesn’t include beefing up the current security regime, which includes stop-and-search of whatever car the ICE folks want up to 200 miles from a border (which is to say, about half the country).

There’s also the problem that many of the yes/no questions don’t really admit of yes/no answers. The death penalty as a punishment for particular crimes? Maybe. For the crime of being innocent and having a lousy lawyer, or being mentally retarded or psychotic, or killing a victim the state cares about? Maybe not. Subsidies for biofuels made from sustainable nonfood sources? Sure. Subsidies for assholes to bid up the price of corn so that some people don’t eat as well? I don’t think so.

Gives homeowners facing foreclosure the option of renting their home for as long as they want at the fair market rate. This rate is determined by an independent appraiser in the same way that an appraiser determines the market value of a home when a bank issues a mortgage.

There’s a little bit of it the should be clarified — Baker talks about adjusting rents according to the CPI for local rents, as monitored by the Labor Department. That number can be a little dicey (it does all kinds of imputation) and could well stand improvement.

“Maybe I’ll be able to give you an intelligent answer once I’ve written about economics for a while. It’s hard (for me, at least) to know what the impact of deficits are. I keep hearing they are bad, but we keep running them and (so far) interest rates remain low and the economy seems to hum (until lately, at least). But maybe it is like a house of cards that one day will collapse.”

The Washington Post used to have economics writers who actually knew something about economics. The mind boggles.